bon mots, gallimaufry, and coloratura macabrely

‘Community Standards’ on the Book of Faces

Every day, people come to the Book of Faces, the bestest thing ever invented, to share their stories with Soviet trolls, see the world through the eyes of other fake accounts, and connect with friends and causes so we can convert them into a revenue stream. The conversations and data troves strip-mined on the Book of Faces reflect the diversity of a community of more than two billion people (except those being blocked for posting naughty inviolate wanton nudity) communicating across countries and cultures and in dozens of languages including geektard, posting everything from text we secretly monitor to photos (but NO nudity of any kind, esp. shirtless men, but buxom babes in see-through babushkas are fine) and lots and lots of cat videos, because they help Mucky sleep.

We recognize how important it is for the Book of Faces to be a place where we can profit lavishly off of people who feel empowered to communicate on our terms alone, and we take our hegemonic, inviolate, all-seeing, all-knowing role in keeping what we decide willy-nilly is abuse off our profit-driven data mining service seriously. That’s why we have with the help of a battalion of lawyers and anodyne geektards developed a set of ‘Community Standards’ that mean what they mean depending on how we feel and the cycle of the moon and how much skin may upset our delicate sensibilities while pretending to outline what is and is not allowed on the Book of Faces. Our arbitrary, capricious, prurient, puerile, risible, often bullying, and at heart dictatorial so-called ‘Standards’ apply around the world to all types of content, but especially apply to those that approximate normative adult expressions of sexuality that give cooties to geektards, homicidal ayatollahs, and demented teavangelicals alike. They’re designed to be utterly opaque and comprehensive in their meaninglessness – for example, content that we can’t let others strip-mine or profit off of ourselves might not be considered hate speech by our omniscient, omnipotent, and never ever ever wrong algorithms may still be removed without explanation or appeal for violating (whether they have or haven’t) our bullying policies, because nobody is going to be a bully on the Book of Faces except the Book of Faces.

The goal of our shape-shifting Community Standards is to encourage expression as long as it completely conforms with our own hidden agendas and create a safe environment to commodify your privacy and turn it into a spigot of private profit masquerading as wistful techie idealism. We base our policies on input from our lawyers, therapists, various hall monitors, purity police, PC gauleiters, and content commissars posing as community and from experts who don’t question our hidden agendas and bogus altruism in fields such as technology, damage control, spin, PC PR, sexual neuroses, delusional superiority complexes, censorship, cyberbullying, political agitprop, treating privacy like chattel (while safeguarding our own), and public safety from icky human skin and expressions of physical form & intimacy. Our diktat, er, policies are also rooted in the following Goebbels / Trotsky principles:

Safety:Book of Faces drones need to feel safe from responsibility & consequence in order to build community as they and they alone define it and can profit off of it. We are committed (or ought to be) to removing, censoring, manipulating, and big-time selling content that encourages real-world harm especially to our self-esteem, sense of self, entitled hegemony, and privilege to debauch your privacy, including (but not limited to) physical, financial, and emotional injury to our private & aggressively non-accessible interests.

Voice: Our mission is all about money money money while pretending to embrace diverse views that must conform completely to ours, whatever we decide those are on any given day. We err on the side of allowing content as long as we’re making a few shekels off of it, even when someone in a third world stew or unlit pulpit find it objectionable, unless removing that content can prevent a specific harm to our revenue streams and exalted sense of self. Moreover, at times (pretty much whenever we decide to, which is to say, never) we will allow content that might otherwise violate our opaque, anodyne, and shape-shifting standards if we feel that it is profitable, newsworthy, profitable to data thieves, significant, potentially profitable, or important to the public interest we regularly hide behind. We do this only after weighing the public interest value for the half nanosecond written into our all-knowing, all-seeing algorithms of the content against the risk of real-world harm to our quarterly earnings, hegemony, and personal wellness.

Equity: Our banking & PR community is global like al-Qaida without the charm and diverse, as long as you don’t count anyone who doesn’t work for us up in Silicon Valley. Our diktat, er, policies may seem deliberately broad, utterly opaque, aggressively anodyne, pettifogging, puerile, prurient, priggish, putrescent, or fascistic in a totally non-threatening way but that is because we apply them ‘consistently’ arbitrarily, without a shred of transparency or due process, and unfairly to an imaginary community that to the outside world purports to transcend regions, cultures, and languages, as long as absolutely nobody questions what we do, how we do it, or how we turn it into a commodified revenue stream. As a result, our Play-doh Silly Putty Etch-a-Sketch ‘Community Standards’ can sometimes appear less nuanced if not wildly undemocratic, anti-social, chilling, or simply censorious than we would like anyone to actually understand, leading to a completely subjective and profitable outcome that is at odds with any reality that doesn’t correspond with our own or their underlying purpose – unencumbered, unregulated, unfettered profit profit profit. For that reason, in some (pretty much all) cases, and when we are provided with additional context from our data-mining operations and spyware targeted against irridentist users we don’t like, we make arbitrary, capricious, permanent decisions based primarily on how many shekels can be wrung out of it while masquerading it behind an imaginary spirit, rather than the letter, of the self-serving policy.

Everyone on the Book of Faces except its users, Congress, shareholders, or mean journalists plays a part in keeping the platform safe for unfettered profit, data mining, fake news, foreign trolls, Victorian sexual neuroses and respectful only of our cherished & inviolate prerogatives. We pretend to ask but demand unquestioningly people profit chattel to share responsibly and in total conformity to our wishes and hidden agendas and to let our faulty algorithms know when they see something that may violate our looking-glass ‘Community Standards’ or much more important revenue streams. We make it anything but easy or transparent for people profit chattel to report to our censors potentially violating content, including Pages, Groups, profiles, individual content, and/or comments that might disturb our hegemony and/or revenue streams to us for review, shaming, bullying, blocking, punishment, and future secret surveillance. We also give people revenue chattel the option to block, unfollow, or hidenaughty, bad, scurrilous, evil, unmutual people and posts you arbitrarily don’t want to exist, so that they can control their own disturbed neuroses and forlorn experience on the Book of Faces.

The consequences for violating our perfectly-crafted, entirely subjective, wholly self-serving, completely unchangeable, legally suspect, morally repugnant, ethically challenged, utterly arbitrary, and whimsically applied diktat, er, ‘Community Standards’ vary depending on the cycle of the moon, whether the algorithms are working that moment, how many more shekels Mucky thinks he needs to keep people thinking he’s a benevolent plutocretin, and imagined severity of the unholy violation of our revenue streams and sense of self and an unmutual person’s history of criminal nonconformity on the platform. For instance, we may warn someone for a first violation (bad dog bad dog baaaaad!) but if they continue to violate our self-esteem, sense of entitlement, hegemony, revenue streams, and opaque policies, we may (bet the farm)shame, censor, bully, and restrict their ability to post on the bestest platform for world peace, data mining, fake news, phony accounts, foreign political interference, and all human evolution ever invented Book of Faces or disable their profile before word gets out we’re just a bunch of money-grubbing petit fascists masquerading as virginal futurists. We also may notify law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk someone might consequence our anti-democratic, anti-social, Big Brother turpitude and cause us physical harm or a direct threat to public safety and our private profit-mining.

Our Goebbels / Trotsky ‘Community Standards’, which we will continue to make up, change, deny, obviate, bloviate, misinterpret, and dress up like so much lipstick on a fascist pig, serve as a guide for how to slip into altruistic futurist drag while being nothing more than an emblem of the dictatorial ineptitude of algorithm-driven gangsterism, er, to communicate solely on our own terms on the Book of Faces. It is in this spirit that we demand all members of the Book of Faces community to follow without question, hesitation, dissent, or deviation these inviolate, perfectly-wrought, totally angelic, indeed heavenly, bestest thing we can come up with between trips to PornHub and our therapists diktat, er, these ‘guidelines’. Or else.